What are you guys smoking if you think any retail joe could even fathom the installation process.
I write software. I have several PCs. Most people might have a laptop these days. I have about 5.
Their PC could be anything from Windows XP to Windows 11 and never Linux. It’s probably full of junk so to think there would 2Gb Ram available and 32Gb disk is pie in the sky.
And talk about Raspberry Pies and Linux Virtual Machines is for very few nerds only!
If you want to create something that a lot of people might use, get real. Like an army sergeant said when I talked about milliseconds: " Where’s Mickey’s hand pointing?"
Specifically to what are you referring in that statement?
Question you need help with?
I dont believe they market this as retail product. Retail meaning, easy to setup like a microwave. HA is clearly Prosumer to Professional where users generally have skill or are willing to learn.
Retail consumer requires plug and play which the HA Green may provide but even then your talking about a process like setting up smarthings where there are many pitfalls that are inherent to the technology. Even phones bluetooth setup for headphones is impossible and the one family member is tech support to do this for everyone. Most home wifi is setup by cable installer and password never changed. This is reality of most retail consumer.
These are more technology issue and not likely to change since user dont wanna learn, they wanna use device. Only exception to setuo difficulty is vendor specific cheats like apple’s device setup process where they control everything and can use special method unavailable when you are not vendor of both products or can make huge assumptions and skip normal steps.
For HA to have such wide compatibility and wide hardware support is amazing. If you know smarthome market prior to HA it was non existent. Before i find HA, in same week i try openhab and could never get started. Its concepts made no sense and start process was pain. I put large effort into testing. I found HA and immediately understood integration setup and learn docker over 3 days(docker was harder on synology).
I believe you are correct but dont understand why you say it because duh!! Even with the difficulty, i think there is nuance of market you miss. In this mess of smarthome market it will never be simple, but HA is making some aspects easier like getting zwave, random wifi switch, esp8266 sensor and alexa to act like they were made to work together.
Another piece is network security which gets wrapped into HA the minute you say “Now i wanna control it from anywhere not at home” because as an open source product intended for local/no cloud use it will always be a consumer hurdle. Other vendors use cloud to avoid home network issues but without that someone gotta do the IT work.
For now suggestions to improve this are helpful.
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I wonder what stuff you are taking… Maybe think about consuming less and read the docs?
The only way any technology product can be made consumer friendly is if AI is used every step of the way, based on some simple user guidance/input.
With the pace of technology advance/change, without AI assistance or access to a tech savvy person, it is impossible for the average Joe to find their way to a successful/useful outcome.
Actually, people who know what either of those are are exactly the target audience. If you’ve no idea what a Raspberry Pi is then you’re probably not the kind of person who wants to automate their home (or other things).
Actually, the stats say otherwise 
Lots of people run Linux.
Then they need to fix that, because 32 GB isn’t exactly a lot of storage (seriously, most phones come with more than that these days).
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